October 08, 2009

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty sparked an unusually angry response from Canada's banks by moving to ban them from using their websites to sell insurance.Announcing the decision Wednesday, Flaherty said the move is in keeping with the government's long-standing policy that banking and insurance functions at the major banks should be kept separate.

Flaherty said he wrote to bank CEOs to inform them of the new policy and to ask that they quickly remove links to their insurance activities from their websites."Since the early '90s, we have had the separation that banks do banking in bank branches and don't do insurance work in bank branches, but that has been affected technologically by the use of websites," Flaherty explained to the media.